Garmin's New 360 Cam Makes Your Stupid Stunts Spherical

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Garmin's New 360 Cam Makes Your Stupid Stunts Spherical

Garmin

Last year Garmin made one of my favorite action cams, the Virb Ultra 30. It's a voice-controlled 4K shooter with great image quality and the ability to layer data like speed and location over your extreme human tricks.

The Virb 360 shoots spherical, VR-compatible video at a resolution of 5.7K.

Today, Garmin is taking the lid off its first entry into the 360-degree action cam space, the Virb 360. I got to spend a few days testing out this new camera, and overall I came away pretty impressed.

The Virb 360 shoots spherical, VR-compatible video at a resolution of 5.7K, and it does it at 30 frames per second. That sounds solid, but even a high-quality 5.7K image looks very pixelated when you spread it over a full sphere. The video isn't nearly as sharp as a traditional 16:9 frame of 4K. But the Garmin has enough resolution to beat most other 360 cameras out there, which typically top out at 4K spheres.

The camera makes a spherical image by using two fisheye lenses facing opposite directions. Images from the dual cameras are stitched into a sphere automatically, making your video instantly ready to share. The camera generally does a very nice stitching job, though the seams are certainly visible when nearby objects pass over them.

In addition to 5.7K video, the Virb 360 can also shoot 15-megapixel spherical photos, burst shots, and time-lapse videos. If you edit the video within Garmin's Virb Edit apps for mobile and desktop, you can apply 4K spherical stabilization to smooth out your video. You can also overlay "G-Metrix" data onto the footage from the camera's internal sensors, just like you could with last year's Virb Ultra 30. Show data from the camera's built-in GPS radio and accelerometer, and pair it with Bluetooth or ANT+ sensors you have strapped to your body to plug even more data into your video.

Garmin

One of the coolest things about this camera is that you can soak it—it's waterproof to 30 feet without a case. I strapped the camera to the nose of my surfboard and spent an hour and a half getting pounded by some cold, central California waves. The camera didn't leak at all, but it did leave me yearning for the self-clearing microphones found on the GoPro Hero5 Black. Any time the Virb 360's four mics took on some water, they could screech like a banshee and take a long time to clear.

My test session with the Virb marked the first time I've ever been able to shoot 360-degree footage of myself surfing. Even though I absolutely sucked that day (I'm out of practice), I couldn't help but smile when I saw all of the unique angles in the video. It's really cool to look at a wave from one direction, rewind the clip, and look at it from the other angle.

Garmin

The footage isn't absolutely drool-worthy, but it's far from terrible, and a great first step into 360 video. I like that to start or stop a recording, you just flip a big switch on the side of the camera, eliminating any doubt about whether or not you're rolling. The camera also features voice control (just like the Virb Ultra 30) and it comes with a small tripod which folds up into a grip. You also get the ability to stream live 360 video to Facebook and YouTube—though at launch, this only works when paired with an iOS device.

The Virb 360 will be available in June for $800, which, gaaaah that's a lot of money! GoPro has started teasing a 360 camera of its own with the GoPro Fusion, though it sounds like that won't be available until this fall. It's worth noting that the Fusion shoots at a lower resolution of 5.2K and there's very little we know about it so far. I'll be doing more testing soon, but for now it seems that Garmin is the 360-degree gorilla in this space.